In a Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Long Term Evolution (LTE) wireless communication system, when a wireless transmit/receive unit (WTRU) performs handover to a target cell, the WTRU uses a dedicated preamble to access a network. A preamble is a signal sent from the WTRU to an evolved Node-B (eNB) to detect timing misalignment in the uplink (UL) during a handover procedure. Accordingly, the target cell needs to reserve a dedicated preamble for the WTRU. However, a non-contention based random access channel (RACH), used by the eNB to provide configuration information of the dedicated preamble, will become overloaded when a large number of WTRUs handover to the same target cell in a short amount of time. Because of this overloading of the RACH, there is a need for a more efficient mechanism by which the dedicated preamble is used during handover.